Page 1987 – fakuto

Just as certain beers are best enjoyed during certain seasons, there are some beers that taste best at a particular time. Light beers like pale lagers are great for day drinking, while darker and hoppier beers are best saved for the evening. Brewing company Suntory Japan decided to take these unwritten rules and make them official: They now sell beers meant to be consumed at very specific times.

The new “Hop Time 6:00 p.m.” and “Hop Time 9:00 p.m.” give these instructions right in the name. Hop Time 6:00 p.m. was specially brewed to drink as the sun goes down; thanks to Hallertau Blanc hops and a late hopping process, the beer is meant to pair perfectly with a sunset. It also sports a bright orange can to further sell the point. Meanwhile, the 9:00 p.m. version wears a darker design on the can that shows a night sky. Citra hops give the beer a smooth floral and citrusy flavor meant to give the feeling of stargazing on a crisp evening.

As you might have guessed, these timely beers are only available in Japan for the time being. While we wait for the trend to come stateside, we’ll have to just make due with the old “it’s five o’clock somewhere” strategy.

[h/t RocketNews24]

Know of something you think we should cover? Email us at tips@mentalfloss.com.

September 28, 2016 – 6:30am

September 28, 2016

Morning Cup of Links: The Worst of ‘Star Trek’

Miss Cellania

filed under: Links

The 15 Worst Episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series. Even when they were train wrecks, we couldn’t stop watching.
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This is Banned Books Week. This year, LGBTQ and Other “Diverse” Books Lead the Banned Books List.
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18 Tweets about physics that will make you laugh. There’s a little astronomy and chemistry in there, too.
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Why You Should Totally Talk Politics Over Family Dinner. Keeping silent to avoid conflict is more stressful than an argument.
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Otzi The Iceman ‘Speaks’ After 5,000 Years Of Silence. Scientists have recreated what they believe may have been the mummy’s voice.
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The average American woman is now a size 16. Here’s what that really means. It’s just a number.
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Who’s getting rich in rural America? Wealthy people are now living next door to poor folks.

September 28, 2016 – 5:00am

September 28, 2016

Sell Your Furniture Online in 5 Simple Steps

Danielle Braff

filed under: furniture, money

Image credit:

iStock

Ready to sell your old furniture? Dark photos and sketchy details won’t find you any buyers. To get the most money for those pieces and get them out of your house quickly, just follow these steps.

1. TAKE A GREAT PHOTO.

First, turn off the flash, says Anne Doherty, owner of Annie’s Attic, who purchases older furniture, refurbishes it, and sells it in Illinois. “Natural lighting is better than flash, so as to capture the true color and not create any dramatic shadows or spotlights, which may be caused by forced lighting or camera flashes.” Most of her shots are taken head-on and at eye level, and she includes detail pictures taken at a slight angle in her listings.

2. SHOW SCALE.

It’s important to include a photograph of your furniture in a lifestyle setting (in addition to a product photo on a white background), says Dayna Winter, content marketer at Shopify. “This helps to show scale, which is important—it’s hard to really picture the size of a couch from measurements,” Winter says.

3. DESCRIBE THE FURNITURE PROPERLY.

There’s an entire book dedicated to parsing the way we talk about furniture: Furniture Phraseology: 842 Furniture Phrases to Help Sell Furniture Online and Offline. That’s how important it is to describe the pieces accurately, says Willie Davis, who wrote the book and was a marketing consultant in the home furnishings industry for 19 years.

Some of the phrases he concocted include: “Finely crafted drawers, roomy and deep enough to store your linens and flatware;” and “The beauty of a pedestal table—but built solidly enough to handle the bumps and jostles of family dinners night after night.” The key is to go beyond simply stating what the piece is and to really make the potential buyer fall in love with it, to make them envision their flatware inside of it.

4. PROVIDE DETAILS.

Identify the furniture’s design in the description, says Harry Rinker, a national antiques and collectibles expert. Is it Mid-Century Modern? Art Nouveau? When was it made? Who manufactured it? Since many people are searching for a specific style, they’ll enter those terms when they’re searching. The more specific you get, the better.

5. GO BEYOND CRAIGSLIST.

There are specific websites designed for furniture-selling, so if you’ve tried Craigslist without any luck, try these:

AptDeco
This site only sells secondhand furniture, and it focuses on antiques, mid-century, and current finds. It’s free to list, and you’ll pay a 23 percent commission for every item you sell. You can offer a free local pick-up, or the buyer can pay a $35 fee to have it delivered.

Viyet
Operating in large cities across the Northeast, California, Florida, and more, this company comes to your home to photograph and list your unwanted furniture. Once you approve Viyet’s suggested pricing of your items, the company will begin to advertise your wares. If your furniture sells, you keep 50 percent of the profits. As an added perk, Viyet will also store your furniture in its warehouse before it sells, should you so desire.

Krrb
You can sell furniture locally through this site, which also aggregates listings found on eBay and Etsy. There’s no commission, but they require credits to list your items—and you have to buy or earn these credits (you can earn credits by completing your profile, shopping on the site, or sharing on social media).

Chairish
Upload a photo of your item (furniture here is pretty high-end), and have it approved. Once sold, you’ll get 80 percent of the sale price, and Chairish will arrange the shipping. The buyer will have 48 hours to return the item.

September 28, 2016 – 4:00am

September 27, 2016

Nab Tuesday’s Top Amazon Deals While You Can

Smart Shopping Team

filed under: shopping

Image credit:

amazon / istock

As a recurring feature, our team combs the Web and shares some amazing Amazon deals we’ve turned up. Here’s what caught our eye today, September 27.

Mental Floss has affiliate relationships with certain retailers, including Amazon, and may receive a small percentage of any sale. But we only get commission on items you buy and don’t return, so we’re only happy if you’re happy. Good luck deal hunting!

September 27, 2016 – 12:41pm

Amazon Product Id:

B00KYCEZQO

September 27, 2016

12 Unusual Sayings About Money From Around the World

Shaunacy Ferro

filed under: language, travel, Words

When it comes to speaking another language, you have to learn more than just vocabulary. All languages have aphorisms that just don’t translate neatly into other cultures, even if you know what the words technically mean.

To that end, the insurance comparison site GoCompare.com put together this handy infographic of how people talk about money around the world. Because whether you’re traveling to Sweden or Bulgaria, you should know how to call someone stingy.

Know of something you think we should cover? Email us at tips@mentalfloss.com.

September 27, 2016 – 2:30pm

September 27, 2016

5 Strange Suggestions About How To Fight the Dust Bowl

Mark Mancini

filed under: History, Lists

Image credit:

Getty Images

It was a disaster of mankind’s own making. By the 1930s, chronic overfarming in the Great Plains had devastated the native grasses that had held topsoils in place. As the plants were uprooted, the dirt dried and loosened, setting the stage for an environmental catastrophe.

In 1931, a drought hit the region—it would last eight years—and the exposed soil was blown away by a series of gigantic dust storms. Mountain-sized dirt clouds became a common sight all over Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico. Nobody who lived there had ever experienced anything like it: skies were blackened, barnyards were buried, and millions of farmers became homeless refugees. As the crisis raged on, people piped up with some wild ideas about how to finally put an end to this “dust bowl.” Here are five of the most peculiar suggestions.

1. PAVE OVER THE GREAT PLAINS.

Many well-meaning citizens assumed that if they could just cover up the loose dirt somehow, it would stop getting blown around so much. New Jersey’s Barber Asphalt Company reached out to the federal government and offered to pave over the afflicted area. Their price? Five dollars per acre. Sounds like a bargain—until you consider the fact that the dust bowl had engulfed around 100 million acres. Meanwhile, a Pittsburgh steel manufacturer wanted to install wire netting over multiple counties, and a company known as Sisalkraft proposed blanketing the ground with its rugged brand of waterproof paper. A similar idea involved laying concrete down over every field in the region and leaving a few holes for future crops.

2. COVER THE TERRAIN WITH BROKEN-DOWN CARS.

One North Carolinian’s suggestion ideally would have killed two birds with one stone. As environmental historian Donald Worster writes in his book Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s, “Mrs. M.L. Yearby of Durham, North Carolina saw an opportunity to beautify her own state by shipping its junked autos out to the plains to anchor the blowing fields.”

3. BOMB THE SKY.

Explosives expert Tex Thornton tried ending the drought with dynamite. In a sales pitch given to the citizens of Dalhart, Texas, he explained that if the explosive was launched skywards and detonated aerially, immediate rainfall would follow. Embracing Thornton’s idea, the town gave him $300 to cover his expenses. Judgment day came on May 1, 1935, when the would-be hero set up shop by a local lake. Thousands of curious onlookers watched from afar as Thornton tied balloons to his dynamite sticks, which had been fitted with timed fuses.

Things quickly went awry once a violent dust storm arrived on the scene. The high winds made it too dangerous for Thornton to even think about releasing the explosives, especially now that a crowd was present. So in a last-ditch effort to deliver the goods, he buried his dynamite and set it off under the ground. Thornton’s Plan B backfired spectacularly: The blast just propelled extra dirt into the dusty atmosphere.

After a few more attempts, rain did come to Dalhart—as well as in regions too far away to be affected by his explosions. A victorious Thornton left Dalhart supposedly saying, “I’m mighty glad that the people of Dalhart and the Panhandle got moisture—and if I had anything to do with it, I’m doubly glad.”

4. USE DEAD REPTILES AS YARD DECOR.

Contemporary folklore claimed that if you hung a deceased snake belly-up over a fence post, it would rain the next morning. When all else failed, some farmers actually tried this during the dust bowl years. Ironically, live snakes would have been far more useful to them. Back then, famished jackrabbits regularly turned up in droves to devour the few crops that were still being grown on the Great Plains. In western Kansas, the situation was so bad that citizens responded by organizing what became known as “jackrabbit drives.” Those involved formed huge lines and marched side-by-side for miles on end. Using their own bodies, they’d corral every rabbit in sight into an enclosure and club them to death. Yet if the species’ natural predators—like certain snakes—had been a bit more common, this drastic measure might not have been necessary. Who knows?

5. BRING THE RAIN WITH A FAUX MILITARY BATTLE.

Many of the more intense showdowns in the American Civil War, including Gettysburg, were followed by severe rainfall. This and other accounts over the years helped give rise to the once widespread belief that artillery caused downpours—a notion that was still fairly pervasive in the 1930s (and was broadly the same hypothesis that Thornton was working with).

One soldier from Denver petitioned the federal government for $20 million worth of ammunition, after which he would round up 40,000 members of the Civilian Conservation Corps for a couple of phony battles. After some non-lethal cannon fire, the rains would return—or at least, that was the plan. “Try it, if it works, send me a check for $5000 for services rendered,” wrote the soldier.

September 27, 2016 – 2:00pm

September 27, 2016

The Science of How The Wave Is Performed at Sporting Events

Shaunacy Ferro

filed under: science, Sports

Image credit:

Otto Greule Jr/Getty Images

The Wave, a favorite of crowds at professional sports arenas, was first recorded at an Oakland baseball game in 1981. It has gone on to delight and disgruntle sports fans at virtually every baseball game since. It’s such a widespread phenomenon that it has even become the subject of scientific inquiry, as Vocativ recently reported.

A Hungarian biological physicist named Illes Farkas studied The Wave (also known as the Mexican Wave, since it made a notable appearance at the 1986 World Cup in Mexico City) as part of a study published in a 2002 edition of the prestigious journal Nature. He was primarily interested in the way the social phenomenon mimics how particles behave, and to analyze crowd behavior, his team used models originally created to study cardiac tissue.

Please enjoy this very important analysis of how The Wave usually works, according to Farkas’s study: (Note that meters have been changed to feet.)

“The wave usually rolls in a clockwise direction and typically moves at a speed of about [39 feet] (or 20 seats) per second and has a width of about [19 to 39 feet] (corresponding to an average width of 15 seats). It is generated by no more than a few dozen people standing up simultaneously, and subsequently expands through the entire crowd as it acquires a stable, near-linear shape.”

Now you know that if you really want to start The Wave, you’re going to have to convince a few dozen people to do it with you. Science says so.

[h/t Vocativ]

Know of something you think we should cover? Email us at tips@mentalfloss.com.

September 27, 2016 – 1:30pm

September 27, 2016

Sacramento Is Now Home to a Permanent Jeff Koons Sculpture

Kirstin Fawcett

filed under: art, cities

Image credit:

Getty Images

Artist Jeff Koons—whose sculpture Balloon Dog sold for $58.4 million in late 2013, setting a world record for highest price paid for a living artist’s work—has debuted a new statue in Sacramento, ARTnews reports.

ARTnewsmag: Here’s a photo of Jeff Koons’s newly installed sculpture in Sacramento, California … pic.twitter.com/Y6V36NQmmh

— Studio 7 y 60 (@Studio7may60) September 27, 2016

Koons officially unveiled the permanent installation on Monday, September 26. It’s a special edition of the artist’s Coloring Book sculpture—an 18-foot work created from a mirror and polished stainless steel, covered in a light wash of color. It was commissioned for a plaza outside the Golden 1 Center, a brand-new indoor multipurpose venue in downtown Sacramento. (The Center will host an open house October 1, and will serve as home arena for the Sacramento Kings NBA basketball team.)

So far, Koons has created five versions of Coloring Book, which was inspired by the character of Piglet from Winnie the Pooh. They’ve been displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Royal Academy of Arts in London, among other venues. Sacramento’s Coloring Book is uniquely colored, and it’s also the first in the series to be installed in a public area, Sactown Magazine reports.

It’s also a testament to Sacramento’s commitment toward investing in public art. But that doesn’t mean everyone loves the statue, CBS Sacramento says. Some people have criticized its steep price ($8 million), and others say that the city should have commissioned a local artist instead of an international one.

[h/t ARTnews]

Know of something you think we should cover? Email us at tips@mentalfloss.com.

September 27, 2016 – 1:00pm

September 27, 2016

Invasive Comb Jellies Crowd the Adriatic Sea

Michele Debczak

filed under: Animals, biology, science, oceans

Image credit:

Steven G. Johnson via Wikimedia Commons // CC BY-SA 3.0

In 1982, an unwelcome visitor arrived in the Black Sea. An oil tanker traveling from the American Atlantic dumped its ballast water into the sea, releasing a flood of warty comb jelly stowaways along with it. The alien invaders have since ravaged the area’s native fish populations, and now New Scientist reports that they’ve become a threat along the northern Adriatic coast.

Warty comb jellies (Mnemiopsis leidyi) have been seen in the Adriatic sea since 2005, but this summer marked the first time they’ve been present in such great numbers. Davor Lučić of the Institute for Marine and Coastal Research in Dubrovnik, Croatia told New Scientist that the clusters get as dense as 500 jellies per square meter in some spots. That estimate is based on fully-matured specimens—the number of juveniles is likely even higher.

The swarms have been documented along the Adriatic coast from Slovenia to Pesaro, Italy. Lagoons in northern Italy have been clogged with the creatures since July. The animals pose no direct threat to people, but their appetite has already proven disastrous to whatever ecosystem they invade.

A few of the warty comb jelly’s meals of choice include fish eggs, fish larvae, and zooplankton. Zooplankton also happens to be the main food source for many commercial fish in the area. Less than a decade after the introduction of the comb jelly into the Black Sea, local anchovy and sardine fisheries were devastated. The seafood industry had lost billions by the mid-’90s.

Now, there’s threat of a repeat catastrophe in the Adriatic Sea. The mass emergence of the species coincides with anchovy spawning season, a crucial time for one of the sea’s most commercially significant fish. Some scientists are looking on the bright side: the Adriatic is more open and less polluted than the Black Sea, and its local fauna is more diverse. This makes the native populations better equipped to survive the invasion. Additionally, Mnemiopsis leidyi isn’t the sea’s only uninvited guest. Another comb jelly, Beroe ctenophore, has also invaded the waters, and scientists hope the aliens might contribute to one another’s demise.

Mnemiopsis likely entered the Adriatic through a ship’s ballast, the same Trojan horse it rode into the Black Sea. This problem isn’t limited to invasive jellies: A list of destructive species from ants to mussels have been introduced to new environments this way. A global treaty that aims to put an end to the issue will go into effect next year.

[h/t New Scientist]

Know of something you think we should cover? Email us at tips@mentalfloss.com.

September 27, 2016 – 12:30pm

1. TAKE A GREAT PHOTO.

2. SHOW SCALE.

3. DESCRIBE THE FURNITURE PROPERLY.

4. PROVIDE DETAILS.

5. GO BEYOND CRAIGSLIST.

GADGETS

KITCHEN

HOME

HEALTH AND BEAUTY

OFFICE, SCHOOL, AND CRAFTS

OUTDOORS, GARDEN, AND SPORTS

ELECTRONICS

TOOLS

1. PAVE OVER THE GREAT PLAINS.

2. COVER THE TERRAIN WITH BROKEN-DOWN CARS.

3. BOMB THE SKY.

4. USE DEAD REPTILES AS YARD DECOR.

5. BRING THE RAIN WITH A FAUX MILITARY BATTLE.